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Minecraft speedrunner DREAM admits to ‘accidentally’ cheating in record-setting run
Dream: “I figured it’s out of the way, and it would be a story I would tell in a few years when no one really cared. I told a couple people and just felt like the community had been through enough drama and that it was pointless.”
Dream is a hugely popular YouTuber and Minecraft speedrunner who has nearly 23 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.5 million followers on Twitter. His runs break records and make the Minecraft world speedrun leaderboard, to the astonishment of many viewers. But suspicions arose about their legitimacy and, in particular, there were accusations about tampering to get better luck.
The controversy began in October 2020 when a speedrunner reported seeing higher RNG drops for key items in a run submitted by Dream earlier that month, which placed fifth on the world leaderboards. Various other runs then came into question because of the high drop rates of two key items – ender pearls and blaze rods – both of which are needed to finish as quickly as possible. Moderators at analysed six of Dream’s streams and found the odds of getting his exact drops were an “unfathomably small” 1 in 177 billion. “There are no circumstances in a natural setting in which bartering and blaze drops could be dependent or biased to any notable degree, much less a degree strong enough to produce this result,” they wrote.